news One of Australia’s largest credit unions, the Qantas Credit Union, has revealed it will deploy a new core banking platform from Infosys’ Finacle division (EdgeVerve Systems), as well as a host of other related services, in a move that the bank says will see it transition to a ‘core banking as a service’ model.

Qantas Credit Union was founded in 1959 by a small group of Qantas employees, but rapidly grew into a much larger organisation. Today it has over 90,000 members and provides a range of services from banking to home loands, personal loans, credit cards, financial planning, superannuation and insurance. It is one of Australia’s largest independent credit unions.

In a statement issued by Infosys last week, the vendor and the credit union revealed they would partner to develop a next-generation platform.

“Qantas Credit Union is leveraging the flexibility of Infosys Finacle’s ‘software-as-a-service’ model to provide its members with the latest banking services, without the significant overhead costs often associated with complete legacy technology upgrade,” the pair said.

As part of the project, the credit union plans to build a new mobile banking and tablet app; Upgrade its online banking platform with more tools, features and enhanced banking functionality; Develop peer-to-peer payments and digital wallet products; And enhance back office efficiencies to reduce application time for credit cards, home loans and personal loans.

According to the pair, Infosys Finacle was selected for its potential to offer a comprehensive portfolio of modules that includes core banking, CRM, e-banking, mobile banking, loan origination, alerts, agency banking and youth banking. EdgeVerve will provide Finacle ‘as-a-service’ through its cloud-hosted platforms.

In addition, Qantas Credit Union will also leverage EdgeVerve’s suite of products including BrandEdge, InteractEdge and AssistEdge to render services such as digital marketing, customer experience management, and intelligent customer service and issues resolution.

Scott King, Chief Executive Officer, Qantas Credit Union said: “At Qantas, we are constantly looking at ways to improve our ability to serve our members better and deliver a world-class service. Our partnership with Infosys Finacle is an exciting one for us. Firstly, it will deliver both short-term benefits and staggered releases, transforming our core system, online, mobile and tablet banking over the next three years.”

“Secondly, this partnership will help us deliver experiences that make banking easy, more personal and opportunities that empower our members to bank with us the way they want to. Lastly, the partnership will see increased efficiencies, streamlining of processes, advanced automation, better insights and reporting, thereby, delivering a competitive-edge.”

Michael Reh, Executive Vice President and CEO (designate), EdgeVerve said: “Australia’s highly competitive banking market is fuelling a rapid transition to mobile and digital services with an increased focus on customer experience. Qantas Credit Union, a leading member-owned financial institution, will now have the ability to adapt and bring innovative products to market more efficiently with our complete end-to-end platform. Finacle’s software-as-a-service’ model enables our customers to provide the latest banking services more flexibly and cost-efficiently.”

opinion/analysis
I’d be interested to know what IT platforms Qantas Credit Union is currently running on. This looks like a positive development in the company’s technological development.

I will add that this would appear to be one of the first times so far that I’ve seen this kind of core banking platform run on a ‘as a service’ basis in Australia. The closest we’ve probably come so far is the extreme cloud computing and virtualisation approach taken by ING, which has been able to virtualise and abstract pretty much its entire IT operation. But outsourcing that to another provider is something else entirely.

I suspect we will increasingly see this kind of platform deployed for minor Australian financial services firms. They just do not have the resources to develop or maintain these kinds of high-end IT platforms themselves like the major banks do. Although, one does wonder whether they are handing off too much long-term competitive market advantage if they allow their platforms to be outsourced in this nature.

1 COMMENT

Do any other banks in Australia use Finacle at all? You’ve previous written about ANZ uses it in Asia (see https://delimiter.com.au/2010/03/02/new-anz-cio-settles-in/), but if no-one is using it in the Australian context this does seem to ramp up the project & transition complexity. Hopefully this won’t become another Project Management object lesson (eg. IBM & Queenland health, Myki etc)

Welcome! We were an energetic and engaged community of Australians who worked with or who were interested in technology -- all sorts of IT professionals, IT managers, CIOs, tech policy-makers and tech enthusiasts.